Makedonas

They did one in Greece a few months ago and also at the European Race Walking Cup I think

1. Rate the performance on a scale of 1-10 I would say 7/10. Although we didn't win as many medals as we'd like, it wasn't a total disaster and we had a lot of young athletes come very close to winning medals which makes us very optimistic for Paris 2024. 2. What were the surprises and heartbreaks ? SURPRISES: 1-Men's water polo team winning silver was definitely a surprise. They were always the type of team that had an outside chance to reach the podium but for various reasons never did so. This time they played really great and had several big wins, including with big margins (+9 against USA and +6 against Montenegro), also beat Hungary twice. 2-Stefanos Ntouskos winning gold in the men's single sculls. I was pretty confident for the past few months that he would win a medal and said it many times on this website, but I did not think it would be gold. He totally dominated his semifinal and final races. 3-The amount of young athletes we had who did so well. There are too many to list but we had some young athletes finish 4th to 9th in many different sports despite not winning medals, so as I said it makes me very confident that 2024 will be good for us and that those who got 5th, 7th place etc will turn those into medals in Paris. Of course also both of our gold medalists were young too, and our men's water polo team was also much younger than the other two medalists. 4-Having five top 8 finishes in athletics. We hadn't done anywhere near that well in athletics since 2004. 5-Seeing so many people in Greece care about our athletes. In Beijing, London and Rio people weren't as interested as they are now. I think social media helped a lot to promote our athletes and get people interested from the younger generations, and also our national TV made a show where they aired special episodes about each athlete/team over the last few months so I think that helped to build interest as well. People got to know our athletes better and learn about them and their life stories. HEARTBREAKS: 1-Our artistic swimming team not being able to compete. I don't think there were any other teams in any sports that had to withdraw completely due to positive covid tests, just individual athletes (I could be wrong). Our girls qualified in the team event for the first time ever (besides 2004) and didn't even get the chance to compete because three of the girls tested positive for covid. They weren't going to a win a medal but they would've finished in 8th place probably and it is unlikely that these girls will ever get the chance to go back to the Olympics. 2-Petrounias getting bronze was a bit sad because we thought he would get silver in the absolute worst case scenario. Also our other gold medalists from Rio got close to the podium but didn't make it (4th, 6th and 6th places). 3-Panagiotis Gionis in table tennis losing 3-4 in the third round after leading 3-1 10-4 and having 8 match points in total (because he had another 2 in the last set). He is 41 and in his fifth Olympics, was trying to make it to the fourth round for the first time ever. I don't think he will ever get another chance like that. 4-Not winning any medals in sailing or tennis. I won't go into details but I was hoping we would win at least 1 medal in each. Sailing is a sport we traditionally do well in and tennis is one of our new sports where we recently started to become good. 5-We were poor in the fighting sports despite having a few medal hopes in some of them. Between fencing, judo, taekwondo and wrestling we had 2 wins and 8 losses. The 2-3 athletes we thought had chances to win medals all lost from the first round. 3. Was your country's goal achieved? I don't think we had a real goal so it's tough to say. I think repeating the success of Rio (6 medals with 3 gold) was probably what our goal should have been, and we did not achieve that (we got 4 medals and 2 gold). 4. Which are the sports that will be invested more in future? -Rowing: We won our first ever gold medal in the sport, and although our rowing team was very small this year compared to previous Games (we only had 4 rowers), all of our rowers are young and did extremely well for their ages. We also did very well last month at the World U23 Championships and I think we will do well at the upcoming World Junior Championships this year, so the sport should get more funding because we have a lot of potential there. -Swimming: Despite not winning any medals, we were close in a couple of events and set some national records as well. In the age category competitions over the past few years we are winning some medals which we rarely used to do in the past, so Greek swimming is definitely on the rise. -Shooting: We didn't win any medals this time and only qualified two shooters, but like swimming we recently started to do well in the age category competitions so it is another sport on the rise in our country. -Weightlifting: We used to be a powerful country in weightlifting. In Atlanta we had 2-3-0 in weightlifting and in Sydney we had 2-2-1. In Athens we just won one bronze and after that everything started to go downhill in the sport (there was also a doping scandal right before Beijing which obviously played a role). Then in London, Rio and Tokyo each time we only had 1 weightlifter when in the past we usually sent very big teams. People in Greece are starting to notice this decline in Greek weightlifting, and we were in danger of not qualifying anyone for the first time since 1964 until our guy (Theodoros Iakovidis) replaced a Colombian weightlifter who had a doping ban. Iakovidis went viral in Greece after his competition where he got 11th, crying on national television about not having any funding. Now he became famous in Greece and went from having a few thousand followers to 220k+ on Instagram. Because of this, a lot of people became interested in him and want to help. We had people who won Olympic medals in the past face similar problems but nobody cared so it's interesting that Iakovidis of all people was the one to capture the public's attention.

I guess this will be the first time since 1964 that Greece doesn't send a weightlifter to the Olympics, unless someone new comes up out of nowhere within the next three years.

Wow that would be a shame. I know in other sports it is an issue in Greece (basketball for example there was the issue with Pitino being chosen as national team coach while he was coaching Panathinaikos), and normally I would agree that they shouldn't do both. However Vlachos gets good results with both teams lately and most of our national team players play for Olympiakos anyways so I think it actually helps that everyone is together all the time.

Both of them have Greek parents so that's very different from countries just buying random athletes with zero connections to the country

I think our gold medal winners Miltiadis Tentoglou (men's long jump) and Stefanos Ntouskos (rowing - men's single sculls) can also shine again in Paris. Tentoglou is 23 and Ntouskos is 24 so at 26 and 27 they should still be at a very high level.

Exactly, another reason why I am proud of Greece because we did everything on our own. The only athlete we had in Tokyo who did not live most of their life in Greece was Stamatia Scarvelis in the women's hammer throw, who is from USA but both of her parents are Greeks. Everyone else was born and lived their whole lives in Greece or came to Greece at very young ages.

That's true, except for judo (where they didn't win medals anyways but had two 5th places)

7 boats for Greece, 4 for boys and 3 for girls. A lot of new names for boys so I'm not sure what to expect there, but for the girls there are people in each boat that won medals at the European Juniors last year and/or World U23s this year so I have high expectations there (of course I don't know about their opponents but I think we should win medals in all three: JW1X, JW2X, JW4-, and at least some golds). However, there was a covid outbreak in the Greek training camp last month so I'm not sure what condition these athletes are in and who else we could have sent. About half of the rowers from the training camp aren't even going to Plovdiv so I'm not sure if that's because they tested positive or other reasons. I guess we'll have to wait and see what happens.

With 13 medals, Turkey won their most total medals ever. Obviously 3 in karate made the difference but what really stands out is the fact that it seems all of their medals were won by actual Turks. In previous Games, about half of their medals came from naturalized athletes that have nothing to do with Turkey. I don't think it says much because Turkey still has a lot of naturalized athletes, they just didn't win medals this time. But I hope that this can be a lesson to all of these countries (Turkey, Azerbaijan etc) that you don't need to naturalize athletes to win a lot of medals. Turkey had their best Olympics ever without naturalized athletes winning medals. Maybe now they can realize that they will be successful by developing their own talents instead of just ruining the Olympic spirit and buying medals. I know I sound like a broken record about this but I am very against these bought athletes who win medals for countries they are not from and don't have connections to other than money. Also it would be interested if someone made a table of medals won like this and also what the medal count would look like without these. For example Azerbaijan won 7 medals in Tokyo. 3 from Ukrainians and 1 from a Cuban.

Why, is Vlachos going to leave? That would be such a shame, I really like him and believe in him. I only disagree with his decisions to not bring Nikolaidis to some tournaments but he is still young and I think soon he will join the team. I know there was also some controversy about dropping Gounas from the team this year but with Olympic and World League medals, I think Vlachos gets a pass from criticism.

I think I remember in 2008 Nikolaidis won a silver on the last Saturday of the Olympics? And sometimes we had the rhythmic group on the last Saturday as well, but yeah other than that I think just marathon runners with no chance of medals. I think in 2012 we had Lebesis in the men's javelin final on the last Saturday of the Olympics if I remember correctly, and Periklis Ilias in the men's cross country cycling race which was on the last day of the Olympics. But again, not people with big chances for medals or anything.

I thought the same about us winning in karate, Eleni Chatziliadou was 2018 world champion and we won 5 medals in May at the European Championships (including one from Chatziliadou). All 5 of our European medalists were at the Olympic qualifying tournament a few weeks later and none of them qualified for Tokyo

In 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2016 Greek women won the same amount of medals as Greek men. This time Greek men won 4 medals and Greek women on 0 medals. First time since 1988 that Greek women didn't win any medals. We had Stefanidi get 4th in pole vault, Sakkari in mixed doubles 5th, Bourmpou/Kyridou 5th in rowing, Korakaki 6th in two shooting events, Tzeli 7th in taekwondo, Teltsidou 7th in judo, Drisbioti 8th in 20km walk, Kyriakopoulou 8th in pole vault, Ntountounaki 9th in 100m butterfly, Karachaliou 9th in sailing etc. We are similar to Canada in a way, based on what @JoshMartini007said, because we also are generalists and don't focus on specific sports. All 4 of our medals this year were in different sports. In Rio we won 6 medals all in different sports except 2 shooting medals which were from the same person. In London and Beijing we also did not win more than 1 medal in a single sport. In this way I think Greece and Canada are similar.

1. She got 6th place. 2. Korakaki got 6th on Day 7, but Ntouskos won GOLD on that day. 3. Day 10 we did get two medals, gold from Tentoglou and bronze from Petrounias. 4. I was wrong about Day 16

Well I was somewhat close with these. Petrounias got bronze, Ntouskos got gold, Tentoglou got gold. Gkolomeev was 5th, Tsitsipas lost in the round of 16, Stefanidi got 4th, Karachaliou got 9th, Prevolaraki lost in the round of 16. Bonus was that we won a medal in men's water polo which I did not expect.

These were too optimistic in the end. No medal in sailing (best results were 8th and 9th), no medal in shooting (best results were 6th and another 6th), no medal in swimming (best results were 5th and another 5th), and only two in "others," but we got another two 4th places in athletics, 5th in rowing, QF in tennis, 7th in judo, 7th in taekwondo, another two 8th places in athletics...

Both of these happened and were fun, silver in water polo and gold in rowing

Congratulations to Serbia on another gold medal. I am proud of our team. I think we had some chances to win gold. We conceded two penalties and had a low % conversion with the exclusions and missed some opportunities, but it's okay. Silver is still a great result for our team and I think this can be the start of many medals for Greece because our team is so young compared with other big teams. For example our oldest player (Fountoulis) is 33. Serbia has 7 players older than him. Serbia's youngest player (Jaksic) is 24. We have 4 players younger than him. Hungary and Croatia for example also have very old teams compared with Greece. I am optimistic about the future

I agree, usually we don't have any events the last two days of the Olympics or we only have events with no chances of medals, so this was cool. Had our team lost in the quarterfinals like they usually do, we would not have had any events the last two days at all.

So in the end we got 4, but Petrounias and Tentoglou did win medals. Although we didn't win as many as I would have liked, we were pretty close and I think these were decent Games for us. We had many young athletes come very close to winning medals and I think Paris 2024 and Los Angeles 2028 will be very very good for us!

At least some of these happened...

^And some more: Kynigakis (22) finishing 5th in the men's 10km swim marathon, amazing result for his age and it looks like we found the new Gianniotis. Filtisakou (20) finishing 29th in the women's 20km walk is also impressive. A year ago I never would've expected her to make it to the Olympics so that's a nice surprise. I hope she can continue to improve. Plus an amazing performance from our men's water polo team to secure a medal. We are pretty young too, I hope this will be the first of many. Also she's 37 so not young, but great result for Drisbioti finishing 8th in the women's 20km walk. She was 15th in Rio and hasn't ruled out Paris. Would be difficult but I'd love to see her improve there too. Still sad that our artistic swimming girls didn't get to compete, but they are very young. Most of the girls are teenagers still. So we end with 4 medals. It could've been better but also could've been worse. I am proud of so many of these results (also Stefanidi 4th and Kyriakopoulou 8th). I think 2024 and 2028 will be really great for us. I'm excited for those Games.

And gold for Ivet Goranova in karate! Best Olympics for Bulgaria in a long time! Congrats!

So true! I remember a Serbian friend saying so in 2016 when Djokovic went out early and some of the Serbian teams in team sports (men's water polo, women's basketball, men's basketball) were doing very poorly. They ended up with 8 medals including 4 from team sports.